iOS 7.1: Turn Parallax Off But Allow Other Motion

In iOS 7.0, there was an option to reduce overall motion in the interface. That meant killing the zoom animation on app launch and the home and lock screen parallax effect. iOS 7.1 adds a measure of flexibility.

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In iOS 7.1, think of Settings > General > Accessibility >Reduce Motion as a master control switch for visible motion in the user interface.

Turning that ON will kill the zoom animation of apps upon launch as well as the parallax effect of icons and alerts.

However, if you turn Reduce Motion OFF, new options appear in Settings > Wallpapers & Brightness.

Tap the desired image: Lock screen or Wallpaper.

If you tap the Lock Screen Image or the Wallpaper image, it will now have an annotation at the bottom. There, you can elect to have the parallax effect turned ON or OFF. Tap the text annotation to toggle, then tap Set.

Bottom of image shown here.

Oddly, in the Reduce Motion annotation, this referred to as parallax. However, on the Wallpaper or Lock Screen image, it's referred to as Perspective Zoom.

In summary, logically:

1. Reduce Motion = ON

App zoom animation on launch is turned OFF

Parallax is turned OFF

2. Reduce Motion = OFF

App zoom animation on launch is turned ON

Parallax/Perspective can be ON or OFF

If you're feeling perverse and would like to have parallax turned ON but disable the app zoom animation at launch, that's not possible in this version of iOS.

I was googling to see if this was an option and you and a few others listed these instructions. After trying it on ipad 2 I noticed it doesnt fully turn it off. It cuts down the parallax effect about 75% i would say and isn’t as drastic but sadly it still does it.